INVESTING IT

INVESTING IT;Patience? This Man Practically Invented It

Published: November 19, 1995

(Page 2 of 3)

Today, though he has given up all administrative responsibility at Carret & Company, which handles investment portfolios of at least $500,000, he is still at his small, cluttered desk every Monday through Friday promptly at 9, picking stocks.

He has no interest in a stock unless he thinks it will at least double, but he is willing to wait for that. He looks on in disapproval and no small measure of befuddlement at the whiz kids managing funds worth hundreds of millions who dart in and out of a market that, in their short careers, has only gone up. "They buy at 10:15 A.M. and sell at 3:45 P.M.," he said, shaking his huge head. "Crazy."

One of Mr. Carret's few recreational activities has been mountain climbing -- "but only the kind where you put one foot in front of the other and walk; I have never hung off the edge of cliffs." He neither smokes nor drinks, and buys no tobacco or alcohol stocks.

He takes only vitamins, but could not help noticing his peers were a strong market for drugs. So about a year ago, he bought stock in Merck, which had been depressed by concerns over managed-health care. The stock met his financial yardsticks and its management impressed him when he paid a visit. Since the purchase, the shares have risen 70 percent. "Most people my age are practically drowning in drugs," he said.

Mr. Carret has no answer to why he has outlived almost everyone, including several doctors. A year and a half ago, he said, he received a mysterious message in his brain, that he would die on April 15. He woke up on tax-deadline day and noticed he was still alive, then spent the day at home, keeping an eye on himself.

"It was a false alarm," Mr. Carret said. "Maybe next year."

The long view is in his genes: virtually all his direct ancestors have lived into their 80's. His father, a lawyer, was 22 when Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address, and his grandfather, the son of Napoleon's paymaster general, was born in 1797. His mother, a social worker who became one of the nation's first probation officers, was 39 when she gave birth to him, her only child.

"I was brought up by old people, my grandmother, old-maid aunts, you name it," he said.

Mr. Carret, born in Lynn, Mass., embodies long New England traditions, becoming a Congregationalist after growing up in the more-liberal Unitarian faith and, like others in his well-off family, attending Harvard. The family's earliest Harvard man, he said, was the Rev. Daniel Gookin, class of 1669. As a freshman in 1914, he was at the new Yale Bowl for its first contest, Harvard-Yale.

In four years, he finished his undergraduate degree and a year at the brand-new business school -- enough, by his reckoning. Chemistry, his first choice, struck him as hopelessly declasse after he visited a grimy gas company laboratory and noticed his tour guide wore a celluloid collar, that era's equivalent of the clip-on tie. "The absolute nadir of sartorial elegance," Mr. Carret said, wincing.

In 1917, he entered the Army Signal Corps, a predecessor to the Air Force. He learned to shoot a machine gun while piloting a Sopwith Camel and was sent to France, but the war ended before he saw combat.

After discharge, he went to work for a small securities firm in Boston, starting at $15 a week. After five months, he got a raise to $20. "I was insulted," at the paltry amount, he said, and took off to roam America, working in mining camps and the like, eventually landing a job selling bonds in Seattle.

It was there, in 1920, that he met Florence Elisabeth Osgood, the granddaughter of a Civil War general and Vermont governor and a 1918 graduate of Wellesley College. They were married in 1922, and had 63 years together before she died in 1986.

They had two sons, a daughter, 12 grandchildren and, as of now, 12 great grandchildren.

Mr. Carret likes to say that Betty, as he called her, was 99.99 percent perfect because only God is 100 percent. "In truth, I never detected a flaw that could represent a 0.01 percent shortfall," he quickly added.

After his marriage, he returned to Boston to the firm he had left, this time in sales. He quit in four months, and went to work at Barron's, the new financial weekly owned by Clarence W. Barron. Mr. Carret, who wrote feature articles, loves to tell stories about his flamboyant boss, who weighed well in excess of 300 pounds and had a flowing white beard.

On one train ride to New York, he recalled, Mr. Barron ensconced himself in his compartment and played bridge most of the trip. But at dinner time, he emerged and walked briskly to the dining car with two colleagues and a secretary, proceeding to dictate letters and issue rapid-fire orders between hurried bites.

"What a workaholic!" people would marvel. "What a phony," Mr. Carret says now.

The most valuable lesson from Mr. Carret's journalistic career came the day Sherman Adams, no relation to Eisenhower's chief of staff, visited the newsroom. Mr. Carret could not help overhearing Mr. Adams describing his idea for a new financial company, which became Massachusetts Investors Trust, one of the first mutual funds.